The Tao of Anarchy: There is no God. There is no State. They are all superstitions that are established by the power-hunger psychopaths to divide, rule, and enslave us. It's only you and me, we are all true and real existence though in one short life. That is, We all are capable to freely interact with one another without coercion from anyone. We all are capable to take self-responsibility to find ways to live with one another in liberty, equality, harmony, and happiness before leaving this world forever. We all were born free and equal among all beings on this planet. We are not imprisoned in and by a place with a political name just because we were born there by bio-accident and social-chance. We are not chained to a set of indoctrinated beliefs that have been imposed upon us by so-called traditions. This Planet is home to all of us. No one owns it. We share the benefits from and responsibility to this Earth. We pledge no oath, no allegiance to no one; submit to no authority. We are all free and equal. The only obligation we all must undertake constantly with consistency is to respect the same freedoms and rights of others.

#FYI: Chelsea Manning and the New Inquisition

The U.S. government, determined to extradite and try Julian Assange for espionage, must find a way to separate what Assange and WikiLeaks
did in publishing classified material leaked to them by Chelsea Manning
from what The New York Times and The Washington Post did in publishing
the same material. There is no federal law
that prohibits the press from publishing government secrets. It is a
crime, however, to steal them. The long persecution of Manning, who on
March 8 was sent back to jail for refusing to testify before a grand jury, is about this issue.

If Manning, a former Army private, admits she was instructed by
WikiLeaks and Assange in how to obtain and pass on the leaked material,
which exposed U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, the publisher
could be tried for the theft of classified documents. The prosecution of
government whistleblowers was accelerated during the Obama
administration, which under the Espionage Act charged eight people
with leaking to the media—Thomas Drake, Shamai Leibowitz, Stephen Kim,
Manning, Donald Sachtleben, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou and Edward
Snowden. By the time Donald Trump took office, the vital connection
between investigative reporters and sources inside the government had
been severed.

Manning, who worked as an Army intelligence analyst in Iraq in 2009,
provided WikiLeaks with over 500,000 documents copied from military and
government archives, including the “Collateral Murder”
video footage of an Army helicopter gunning down a group of unarmed
civilians that included two Reuters journalists. She was arrested in
2010 and found guilty in 2013.

The campaign to criminalize whistleblowing has, by default, left the
exposure of government lies, fraud and crimes to those who have the
skills or access, as Manning and Edward Snowden did, needed to hack into
or otherwise obtain government electronic documents. This is why
hackers, and those who publish their material such as Assange and
WikiLeaks, are being relentlessly persecuted. The goal of the corporate
state is to shroud in total secrecy the inner workings of power,
especially those activities that violate the law. Movement toward this
goal is very far advanced. The failure of news organizations such as The
New York Times and The Washington Post to vigorously defend Manning and
Assange will soon come back to haunt them. The corporate state hardly
intends to stop with Manning and Assange. The target is the press
itself.

“If we actually had a functioning judicial system and an independent
press, Manning would have been a witness for the prosecution against the
war criminals he helped expose,” I wrote after I and Cornel West attended Manning’s sentencing
in 2013 at Fort Meade, Md. “He would not have been headed, bound and
shackled, to the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. His testimony
would have ensured that those who waged illegal war, tortured, lied to
the public, monitored our electronic communications and ordered the
gunning down of unarmed civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and
Yemen were sent to Fort Leavenworth’s cells. If we had a functioning
judiciary the hundreds of rapes and murders Manning made public would be
investigated. The officials and generals who lied to us when they said
they did not keep a record of civilian dead would be held to account for
the 109,032 ‘violent deaths’ in Iraq, including those of 66,081
civilians. The pilots in the ‘Collateral Murder’ video, which showed the
helicopter attack on unarmed civilians in Baghdad that left nine dead,
including two Reuters journalists, would be court-martialed.”

Manning has always insisted her leak of the classified documents and
videos was prompted solely by her own conscience. She has refused to
implicate Assange and WikiLeaks. Earlier this month, although President
Barack Obama in 2010 commuted her 35-year sentence after she served
seven years, she was jailed again for refusing to answer questions
before a secret grand jury investigating Assange and WikiLeaks. While
incarcerated previously, Manning endured long periods in solitary
confinement and torture. She twice attempted to commit suicide in
prison. She knows from painful experience the myriad ways the system can
break you psychologically and physically. And yet she has steadfastly
refused to give false testimony in court on behalf of the government.
Her moral probity and courage are perhaps the last thin line of defense
for WikiLeaks and its publisher, whose health is deteriorating in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been holed up since 2012.

Manning—who was known as Bradley Manning in the Army—has undergone
gender reassignment surgery and needs frequent medical monitoring. Judge
Claude M. Hilton, however, dismissed a request by her lawyers for house
arrest. Manning was granted immunity by prosecutors of the Eastern
District of Virginia, and because she had immunity she was unable to
invoke the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination or to
have her attorney present. The judge found her in contempt of court and
sent her to a federal facility in Alexandria, Va. Hilton, who has long
been a handmaiden of the military and intelligence organs, has vowed to
hold her there until she agrees to testify or until the grand jury is
disbanded, which could mean 18 months or longer behind bars. Manning
said any questioning of her by the grand jury is a violation of First,
Fourth and Sixth Amendment rights. She said she will not cooperate with
the grand jury.

“All of the substantive questions pertained to my disclosures of
information to the public in 2010—answers I provided in extensive
testimony, during my court-martial in 2013,” she said on March 7, the
day before she was jailed.

“I will not comply with this, or any other grand jury,” she said
later in a statement issued from jail. “Imprisoning me for my refusal to
answer questions only subjects me to additional punishment for my
repeatedly-stated ethical objections to the grand jury system.”

“The grand jury’s questions pertained to disclosures from nine years
ago and took place six years after an in-depth computer forensics case,
in which I testified for almost a full day about these events,” she went
on. “I stand by my previous public testimony.”

Manning reiterated that she “will not participate in a secret process
that I morally object to, particularly one that has been historically
used to entrap and persecute activists for protected political speech.”

The New York Times, Britain’s The Guardian, Spain’s El País, France’s
Le Monde and Germany’s Der Spiegel all published the WikiLeaks files
provided by Manning. How could they not? WikiLeaks had shamed them into
doing their jobs. But once they took the incendiary material from
Manning and Assange, these organizations callously abandoned them. No
doubt they assume that by joining the lynch mob organized against the
two they will be spared. They must not read history. What is taking
place is a series of incremental steps designed to strangle the press
and cement into place an American version of China’s totalitarian
capitalism. President Trump has often proclaimed his deep animus for
news outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post,
referring to them as the “enemy of the people.” Any legal tools given to
the administration to shut down these news outlets, or at least hollow
them of content, will be used eagerly by the president.

The prosecutions of government whistleblowers under the Espionage
Act, warrantless wiretapping, monitoring of the communications of
Americans and the persecution of Manning and Assange are parts of an
interconnected process of preventing any of us from peering at the
machinery of state. The resulting secrecy is vital for totalitarian
systems. The global elites, their ruling ideology of neoliberalism
exposed as a con, have had enough of us examining and questioning their
abuses, pillage and crimes.

“The national security state can try to reduce our activity,” Assange
told me during one of our meetings at the embassy in London. “It can
close the neck a little tighter. But there are three forces working
against it. The first is the massive surveillance required to protect
its communication, including the nature of its cryptology. In the
military everyone now has an ID card with a little chip on it, so you
know who is logged into what. A system this vast is prone to
deterioration and breakdown. Secondly, there is widespread knowledge not
only of how to leak, but how to leak and not be caught, how to even
avoid suspicion that you are leaking. The military and intelligence
systems collect a vast amount of information and move it around quickly.
This means you can also get it out quickly. There will always be people
within the system that have an agenda to defy authority. Yes, there are
general deterrents, such as when the DOJ [Department of Justice]
prosecutes and indicts someone. They can discourage people from engaging
in this behavior. But the opposite is also true. When that behavior is
successful it is an example. It encourages others. This is why they want
to eliminate all who provide this encouragement.”

“The medium-term perspective is very good,” he said. “The education
of young people takes place on the internet. You cannot hire anyone who
is skilled in any field without them having been educated on the
internet. The military, the CIA, the FBI, all have no choice but to hire
from a pool of people that have been educated on the internet. This
means they are hiring our moles in vast numbers. And this means that
these organizations will see their capacity to control information
diminish as more and more people with our values are hired.”

The long term is not so sanguine. Assange, along with three
co-authors—Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie
Zimmermann—wrote a book titled “Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet.”
It warns that we are “galloping into a new transnational dystopia.” The
internet has become not only a tool to educate, they write, but the
mechanism to create a “Postmodern Surveillance Dystopia” that is
supranational and dominated by global corporate power. This new system
of global control will “merge global humanity into one giant grid of
mass surveillance and mass control.”

“All communications will be surveilled, permanently recorded,
permanently tracked, each individual in all their interactions
permanently identified as that individual to this new Establishment,
from birth to death,” Assange says in the book. “I think that can only
produce a very controlling atmosphere.”

“How can a normal person be free within that system?” he asks. “[He or she] simply cannot, it’s impossible.”

It is only through encryption that we can protect ourselves, the
authors argue, and only by breaking through the digital walls of secrecy
erected by the power elite can we expose the abuses of power. But
ultimately, they say, as the tools of the state become more
sophisticated, even these mechanisms of opposition will be difficult and
perhaps impossible to use.

“The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation,” Assange writes,
“has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of
totalitarianism we have ever seen.”

That is where we are headed. A few resist. Assange and Manning are
two. Those who stand by passively as they are persecuted will be next.